


Our dreadful marches

by lilith_morgana



Series: Sense and accountability [4]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-05
Updated: 2015-05-05
Packaged: 2018-03-29 04:35:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3882535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the year of the Herald. </p>
<p>Elissa and Loghain during DA:I.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our dreadful marches

  
**  
**  
  
_Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,  
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments  
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,  
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. _  
  
 **Richard III - Shakespeare**  
  
  
  
  
  
 **1**.  
  
It's the year of the Herald.  
  
That's what people say, at least. That's what's being whispered in the streets and marketplaces - words tossed around like coin in the taverns along the road.  _She walked out of the Fade! They say she carry magic from the Maker himself!_ Loghain hears the hollow doubts and feverish excitement – and the fear, always that brittle, human  _fear_ of the unknown - among the outcries, hears it from all those who cannot afford to hope and from all those who can.   
  
It's considerably more difficult to notice the whereabouts and supposed miracles of a legend in the making as you trod through the ruins of your own order of warriors, Loghain finds. Or when you flee from said order while you try, with some sort of helpless sense of duty, to drag it away from extinction. Clarel's passionate voice in his memory, her flaring eyes, her unmerciful resolve. Had he looked like that, too? Is that what Cauthrien had seen at Ostagar, what Maric and Rowan and Celia had tried to soften in him, their hands and mouths and hearts pressed tight around strategies and maps. _It's monstrous, Commander._  
  
\--  
  
He leaves Elissa with a note and his best helmet, clenches his fists and presses forward because there are things he cannot allow himself to think too much about, places that tear him up if he lets them and Elissa's bed is one of them (as is her arms, her voice, her body wrapped all over his; their endless, unbroken strength).  
  
 _Don't search for me. Stay out of sight. /L_  
  
\--  
  
“Mac Tir.” The low voice is teasing, always oddly warm. She calls him by his last name when they are alone, a calm nod at a past they share somewhere deep down in their bones.  __Hawke, you go with Ser Cauthrien. Yes, both you of. Her brother's reckless resolve, the responsibility in her eyes, already carrying far too much, upholding far too many. That thread of broken promises that runs through them, glittering like a spider's web in the setting sun.  
  
“Hawke.” He nods at the woman who gradually appears from behind the curtains.   
  
  
  


* * *

  
  


  
  
**2** .  
  
It's the year of the Herald and Elissa spends the better part of it in a too-old keep, frowning over dusty tomes and Warden chronicles, doing her best not to feel disturbed by her most frequent company.  
  
Avernus keeps his distance, she keeps hers, but they are both _ there _ , joined in a search for answers she had once dismissed as unethical. Everything was clear back then, when the infected blood didn't sing so loudly in her veins and when she had never seen a brother or a sister walk to their last fight as a ghost of who they once were. Everything was thought-out back then, was deliberate, part of a plan. The Landsmeet forever branded at the back of her mind: the way Loghain had looked at her then; the way she had seen the relief in him, read furious hopelessness in every line of his face; the way in which she understood suddenly what war does to the human body (the human  _ soul)  _ and understood, too, that he had done the best he could. There's no comfort in that but truth is rarely comforting and ideals were never meant to be laws.  
  
“Use every available method,” she tells Avernus curtly over her goblet of wine in the evening. It's cold outside, she needs the low hum of spiced wine in her limbs to find any rest these days.  
  
The old – _ much _ too old – man gives her a nod and there's a familiar glint in his eyes. There's a familiar woman there, a ghost that binds them long after her body has decayed and her soul has been laid to rest.  _ Make them pay for every inch!  _ At times Elissa imagines that the voice of Sophia Dryden lives among stone and wood, a fortification to the castle she sacrificed everything and everyone to defend.  
  
_ You remind me so much of her _ , he tells her and these days she isn't certain if it's much of an insult.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
Months earlier and Loghain is the first of them to hear the Calling.  
  
Hears it as whip through his thoughts and dreams – she knows this because later the nightmare is hers, too, and the burden is shared – and as a thunder that brings him to his knees outside, on the ground. Palms flat on cold, wet stone, head held still, breaths slowly easing as the turmoil fades out.  
  
When he turns his head to look her in the eyes she knows, there and then, that whatever it is they've been trying to hide from has found them.  
  
“Loghain,” she mutters, lips against his forehead, his temples, the back of his neck.  
  
“ _ Elissa _ .” His voice is a rumble, his hands dirty and full of rubble when they come around her waist, claw at her hips. He repeats her name, over and over and her teeth clash with his as they kiss, fierce and graceless, like animals would if they could. They kiss on the ground, against the wall, panting and grunting and hissing with hands cupped around the back of her neck and his mouth covering fresh injuries and old scars alike when she spreads her legs wide, pushes him inside with nothing on her mind but an oath.  __ I refuse to let it end like this. To let me end like this. To let you end like this. I refuse, I refuse, I refuse.  
  
It's the only thing in her body as they part, as sleep claims them again and they wake up without other voices in their thoughts thinking it has ended. Of course it hasn't.  
  
Eventually it begins to linger. Nothing for a few nights, then another nightmare. Confusion. A horror that catches them wide-awake. A murmur of destruction. More and more, until it's a presence in their minds, a weight in their chests and her promise that hardens to steel in her throat.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
She writes a reply on the back of the note, sticks it to the back of the helmet by way of responding to a message not meant to be responded to but if he passes by again, she thinks as her hand shakes slightly, leaving the letters more than ordinarily messy. If he passes by she wants him to know.   
  
_ Bastard _ .  __ I'll always search for you. /E   
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
**3** .   
  
After everything, it comforts him to see doubt in the Inquisitor's eyes.   
  
Doubt, questions, even fear at the bottom of the steady gaze that travels over his face when they meet for the first time. He's seen too much mad conviction in his long life of war; her disbelief tangles with his own at the pit of his stomach and spreads, like fire.  
  
"Varric's right about her," Hawke says, thoughful and tired, wiping sweat and blood off her forehead. "That's good to know."  
  
It is.   
  
Her magic might be from the damned Maker, Loghain thinks as he fights alongside her for the first time, fights through the hordes of wretched souls in the desert. But her sword-arm is from this bloody, half-ruined world.   
  
Even if she's not blessed by Andraste or sent by the Maker, she's certainly quite  _ something _ . A crack in every surface, a walking uproar wherever she travels. There are parts of her – wild, furious parts hidden behind proper upbringing and manners – that remind him of Elissa and it makes him want to rush to her side, take the blows meant for her because this one, at least, he can protect.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
He sees Elissa every day. In every Warden armour, in every crowd, in every corner.  
  
He sees her in every body he places between himself and Clarel at Adamant where the sky burns with magic and fear and the sting of it, the sharp needles, make his eyes tear up momentarily.  
  
He sees her dead, _ corrupted  _ in the Fade and hears her curse at him every time he drives his sword through the place where her heart would be.   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
**4.**   
  
She meets Clarel once.  
  
Once, and the sound of Elissa's breastplate crashing to the floor is the only thing she remembers afterwards. The sight of the Warden insignia overthrown, kicked by angry heels into a cobweb. They argue over the First Warden, over orders found the letters from Anderfels, the disorganised quiet turmoil of their Order.   
  
"There was voting," she tells Loghain later, over a tankard of Orlesian mead that tastes awful and bitter, like drinking her own defeat. "I lost."  
  
He doesn't say anything, doesn't even tease her about her inability to accept defeat, to clench her teeth and submit. _ Yes, ser. _   
  
He doesn't say anything because they're past thinking of themselves as soldiers now, past thinking of orders as something to be followed.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
She sees the Warden-Commander fall from the highest point of Adamant fortress, a small shape against the night sky and against the massive dragon she's taking down with her.  
  
In her mind, the voices have grown quieter over the past few days, crawled back to wherever they once came from and Elissa breathes slow and steady, counting every breath. But this is a scream in her veins, a shivering, twisting shout that drags her to her knees. She wonders how this death feels. How Clarel dies, how it goes. She wonders what she thinks, what she regrets, if she knows half of what Elissa has begun to piece together from her research and old archives. Wonders, too, if she would sit down beside the other woman if she could, hold her hand or close her broken eyes. _ You did the best you could. _   
  
When she looks up again, the veil gashes wide-open above her head.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
She searches for him in the ruins.  
  
It takes four nights and four days to identify the fallen Wardens - to decide which ones that are too maimed, too brutally broken to be recognised – and carry their corpses out of sight. Four and her body aches with every dead one she sees, with every face that isn't his or can't be his or _ Maker's sodding breath, no _ .   
  
There are a few makeshift camps outside the fortress and she stays in one of them, then moves on to the next. She lets nobody know her name or purpose and finds that it's remarkably odd and exhilarating to be no one, to have promised nothing.   
  
The fourth night, the one that follows hopeless heat and the scent of warm, burning flesh from the funeral pyres, there's a solitary shape against the still-burning funeral pyres, approaching her in a quick stride. She knows it's Loghain, she knows he hadn't been among the dead, she _ knows _ it but even so there are no words left in her body when her arms wrap around his neck and his face rests against her shoulder. No words, but a  _ shudder _ , like a twisted scream.    
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
**5**.   
  
The sand around them hides the war that was never meant to be fought; his shape beside her hides a lifetime of worry that she will never tell him about, a concern that he will never put into words but that she can sense simply by looking at him. A lot of things get disproportionate if you talk about them, a lot of things matter too much, or not nearly enough and they have bigger concerns. And there is much to discuss once they are on the road again; she has nearly a year's worth of secrets and events to tell him, knows he has just as much he will reveal to her.   
  
Elissa glances at him now, tracing the sharp line of his nose with her gaze. Loghain shifts briefly, looking at a spot behind her or inside himself, she can't say which.   
  
"You realise this is your chance to slip away gracefully." It's not posed as a question; they rarely need to ask each other questions any more. It's an observation, an _expectation_.  
  
"I do," she says. In all of history she would have to struggle to find a time better suited for casual disappearance. Take a step too far, slip into a crowd of strangers and be gone forever. Out of sight, out of mind, out of the chronicles they will undoubtedly write about this year and its Herald.   
  
"But you would not leave." There is grief around the words, grief and quiet wonder and _love_ and she turns her face towards his, slowly. “Even now.”  
  
"And miss the chance to see how you refuse to die decently in the Anderfels? _Never_."  
  
There are things that could be said, pressed into this narrow space between them now: _you shouldn't - this is madness - I don't deserve it._ But they are long past the measuring and scales, don't allow their language to express it.   
  
Instead her hand slips almost effortlessly into his for a second and they stand there, shoulder to shoulder, gazing at the road that lies ahead.  
  


 


End file.
